U.S. Leading Charge on Synthetic Biology Funding

Synthetic biology received about $430 million in U.S. government funding from 2005 to 2010, far outpacing European governments, which gave their synthetic biologists $160 million over the same period. The emerging field received nearly no funding before 2005, according to a new Woodrow Wilson Center report.

The numbers are the latest indication that synthetic biology has become a buzzword at the highest-levels of politics and policy. Last month, President Obama convened a special commission to study synthetic biology and the House held a special hearing on the topic. Both events were apparently prodded by the J. Craig Venter Institute’s announcement that they implanted a genome that was once a text document filled with letters into a living cell.

Though synthetic biology support is growing, it’s far from a major research area for any government. The U.S. government alone spends almost $150 billion on R&D, the majority of which goes to “defense,” broadly construed. The largest part of the civilian science budget, about $30 billion, goes to “health,” which includes biomedical research.

The new numbers on synthetic biology, while interesting, are not definitive, said Todd Kuiken, a research associate on the Synthetic Biology Project at the Wilson Center. Government agencies don’t specifically track synthetic biology projects as a line-item, and even the definition of the field is squishy. For example, Stanford synthetic biologist Drew Endy says the field’s long-term goal is to “help make biology easy to engineer.” No government process exists that sorts out projects fitting Endy’s definition, especially from the genetic engineering that scientists have long done.

Because of the difficulty categorizing what is and isn’t synthetic biology as well as extracting the information from the agencies, Kuiken said he thinks the real amount of money being spent on synthetic biology is higher than the number in the initial research brief. But he hopes that putting a provisional number on it will cause the government to start tracking their investments.

“If you at least get a number out there that is public, it forces the agencies to look deeper at it,” Kuiken said.

One interesting twist to the numbers is the lack of funds dedicated to evaluating any peculiar risks posed by synthetic biology techniques.

“There is no project that we’ve seen looking at the risk,” Kuiken said.

That said, about 4 percent of the research money is going to study the “ethical, legal and social implications” of the technology, which is comparable to how much nanotechnology money is spent on those issues.

The Synthetic Biology Project also assembled a map of all the institutions working on synthetic biology problems, which you can see above.